Quotes about Science

I believe there is no philosophical high-road in science, with epistemological signposts. No, we are in a jungle and find our way by trial and error, building our road behind us as we proceed. We do not find signposts at crossroads, but our own scouts erect them, to help the rest.

But I believe that there is no philosophical highroad in science, with epistemological signposts. No, we are in a jungle and find our way by trial and error, building our road behind us as we proceed. We do not find signposts at crossroads, but our own scouts erect them, to help the rest.

One cell in its unspeakable complexity would be worth the worship and awe of the entire universe. And cells were everywhere, their miraculous ness diminished only by their ubiquity.

The debate that has been conducted in terms of "creation versus evolution" has gotten caught up with all kinds of other debates, and this has provided a singularly unhelpful backdrop to the would-be serious discussion of other parts of the Bible.

The author explains the evidence for they would help from astronomy. He says that if planets are behaving in a way that cannot be explained by what is already known, then another planet is searched for which would explain their behavior. This, he says, is actually how the more distant planets were discovered. We look, then, for something that would explain what is not inexplicable from what we already see.

Our philosophies have tended to split the world in two: "science" deals only with "hard facts," while the "arts" are imagined to deal in nebulous questions of inner meanings. Equally, in popular culture, inner feelings and motivations (" discovering who you really are" or "going with your heart") are regularly invoked as the true personal reality over against mere outward "identities.

If we thought that because we now lived in the 'modern world' we were exempt—that our science and technology had now produced 'progress' that would eliminate all such things—we were obviously wrong. Just like those at the end of the nineteenth century who thought that Western society was now advancing smoothly towards the Kingdom of God. So, throughout Church history, Jesus' followers have usually avoided such lines of thought.

Instead of "thinking God's thoughts after him," science was now studying the world as though God didn't exist.

late modernity has tried to squeeze more and more areas of human discourse into the first type of "truth," making a "fact" out of everything and thereby trying to put everything into the kind of box which can be weighed, measured, and verified as if it were an experiment in the hard sciences like chemistry, or even an equation in mathematics. But this attempt has overreached itself, not least in areas like history and sociology.

science takes things apart to see how they work, but religion puts things together to see what they mean.

Science studies the repeatable; history studies the unrepeatable.

The Christian religion, hand in hand with various philosophical outlooks, has motivated, sanctioned, and shaped large portions of the Western scientific heritage. Modern Christians ought to drink deeply at the well of historical precedent. If we do, we will never feel intimidated by positivists and others who deny that religion has any role in genuine scholarship. In the broad scope of history, that claim is itself a temporary aberration-a mere blip on the screen, already beginning to fade.